Damn Great Empires! provides a new perspective on the works of William James by placing his encounter with American imperialism at the center of his philosophical vision. This book reconstructs his overlooked political thought by treating James’s anti-imperialist Nachlass—his speeches, essays, notes, and correspondence on the United States’ annexation of the Philippines—as the key to the political significance of his celebrated writings on psychology, religion, and philosophy. It shows how James located a craving for authority at the heart of empire as a way of life, a craving he diagnosed and ... More

Damn Great Empires! provides a new perspective on the works of William James by placing his encounter with American imperialism at the center of his philosophical vision. This book reconstructs his overlooked political thought by treating James’s anti-imperialist Nachlass—his speeches, essays, notes, and correspondence on the United States’ annexation of the Philippines—as the key to the political significance of his celebrated writings on psychology, religion, and philosophy. It shows how James located a craving for authority at the heart of empire as a way of life, a craving he diagnosed and unsettled through his insistence on a modern world without ultimate foundations. Livingston explores the persistence of political questions in James’s major works, from his writings on the self in The Principles of Psychology to the method of Pragmatism, the study of faith and conversion in The Varieties of Religious Experience, and the metaphysical inquiries in A Pluralistic Universe. Against the common view of James as a thinker unconcerned with questions of politics, this book places his writings in dialogue with champions and critics of American imperialism, from Theodore Roosevelt to W. E. B. Du Bois, as well as a transatlantic discourse of modernity, in order to excavate James's anarchistic political vision. Bringing the history of political thought into conversation with contemporary debates in political theory, Damn Great Empires! offers a fresh and original reexamination of the political consequences of pragmatism as a public philosophy.